GQ Editor Will Welch on masculinity, celebrities, and staying cool as he ages

0:07Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore where we are talking to all of the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And with me just a few rooms away, actually, that's just a little insider tip or secret for all of our listeners and viewers, is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. How's it going, Ben? Good. I'm thrilled to be here. This week, we are excited to be chatting with the editor-in-chief of GQ. That's Will Welch. We'll talk to him about what it means to write about and cover men in the year 2025, a very light topic.

0:47How the end of the monoculture has shaped GQ over the 20 years that Will has been there. Why he loves working with Robert Pattinson. And why the future of GQ may lie with Twitch streamers like Phantom. Ben, do you know who Phantom is? Do you have any idea who Will is talking about? I am struggling to know anything about either Phantom or men's fashion. So I'm excited to learn. Well, neither of us know very much about either, but we do know about media. So we'll ask some of the questions about all of the above to Will right after the break.

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2:33So Ben, you run a publication. I'm curious, what's the percentage of people who read and engage with Sebafor that are men versus the percentage that are women? Do you know that information offhand? I do not know that offhand. We slice and dice our audience a lot of ways, but that's not top of the list. That's interesting because I would imagine that's something that's very close to the top of the list for tech algorithms or even some people who run media organizations. I feel like I knew that information when I worked at other publications. Why do you think that is that you don't, that's not something that you really care about?

3:10I mean, I think in a way we're looking at people very much by their professions and addressing them as professionals because in some sense, a lot of our business is organized around reaching people in their professional lives. The people who most want to know your sex are people trying to reach you as consumers. So somebody who clearly knows a little bit more about the gender breakdown of their audience is Will Welch, who is our guest today. Ben, do you know Will at all? Have you bumped into him in your professional careers as editors-in-chief? Not really. Only from afar. You guys aren't going to the secret confab, off-the-record things where you all complain about your employees, people such as me?

3:49Yeah, I don't know why he's not invited to that one. He must have no problems with his employees. I think that he also is hanging out with celebrities and we're hanging out with other people in kind of media. He's like one of the, he's one of those people who, there are a few people in journalism who are still, who still manage to become celebrities and more widely known. And I think Will is one of those people. And I think we were both interested in chatting with Will because he has this role as head of GQ. He's been the editor in chief there for eight years at a moment when a lot of people are really interested in men, seemingly again.

4:24I don't know. I feel like we kind of were interested in the bad things that men were doing for a while. Right now, in the wake of the 2024 election, I guess it's been a year, but we're still talking about it and its implications. As we talk about the male loneliness epidemic, the emergence of the manosphere, these gaps between men in terms of their education and happiness levels and various things like that. And so I actually think that Will clearly seems to be grappling with this. You can see it in the editorial. And I think it makes it a really interesting moment to have a conversation with him about what's going on with men.

4:56What is media for men these days? What's media for men that's not like the horrible stuff that we read and sometimes write about in the newsletter? I don't know, Ben, what do you think about what I'm getting at here? Yeah, I think it's an incredibly complicated job. It's always been a complicated job, you know, in some sense, like setting and embodying these trends and never more confusing, never more politicized. I think also the one thing that I will be curious to ask him about is how much of his job is dealing with the kind of fashion stuff to buy element of things, which is what I feel like I grew up knowing GQ for.

5:35Like I would go to literally Barnes & Noble and pick it up and be like, okay, that's a jacket that rich people wear. And how much of it is like this leaned back, heady stuff about the future of men and how much he's really thinking about this and whether or not that ratio has changed over the course of the last few years. If those aren't exactly the same questions, right? Well, I guess we'll ask him. We're a few minutes late. We've gone over on this intro. So Will is waiting for us. Why don't we bring him in right now? Will, thank you so much for joining us. As we were talking about before the show, for people who are watching on YouTube or watching our little clips, your background looks just fantastic.

6:14People say that magazines are over. I read that. Graydon Carter was saying it's terrible now, but clearly not. We've got a nice view there. Still got views of the Hudson River, so all's not lost. Yeah. GQ, I feel like I first started reading or interacting with it. I was telling Ben this before we started recording. Whenever, like, my mom would take me to, like, Barnes & Noble in Santa Ana, California, and, you know, ostensibly to buy books to enrich my life in some way as a teenager. But what I would really end up doing was going to the magazine section and just looking at clothes and things that I couldn't necessarily afford.

6:48But when I first started to get to know GQ, that was my conception of it. A magazine that was telling me as a suburban teenager what to buy, what was cool, what was aspirational. What is GQ in 2025? The tagline that we put on it when I became editor-in-chief in the end of 2018 was, we're the global flagship of men's fashion. And the idea was to re-seize that position because it had become, I think, something really compelling but much broader than that. And so in a way, I just believe that in the era of the internet, this is a very niche-driven culture, and it's very hard to be broad. If you want to have a cultural impact, which is my highest focus, and you want to grow, I think you need to find a way to be concise and be declarative and essentially to be niche.

7:43And so really recommitting ourselves to that mantle of the global flagship of men's fashion. And then we have another way of thinking about it and talking about it that goes, it's for people who see the world through the lens of taste and style. And I use the word people intentionally. We have a lot of female readers in addition to male readers, although we're like classically and proudly a men's magazine. I have friends, I have relatives, et cetera, who like really see the world through a political lens. That's like how they get up in the morning. Those are like the lenses in their glasses and others are interested in style and lifestyle and culture.

8:19And of course that gets you to politics and all these other places as well, but just trying to like really be focused. focused. So I think, yeah, I imagine, obviously, it's now mostly on YouTube and TikTok and GQ.com, etc. But I think there are probably still young people who are discovering GQ through all these different portals. And hopefully, as I did, and as it sounds like you did, finding something to latch on to and find something that like, stimulates them or makes them think differently or gets them excited in some way. So I am curious, like so much of the job of an editor, I mean, I feel this is kind of patrolling the boundaries of your brand and like understanding, yeah, that is a story for us.

9:01No, that's not a story for us. And I'm curious how you sort of do set those boundaries for what makes it a men's magazine. What's content for a men's magazine? What isn't? Yeah. I don't think we really sort through the news of the day and in our morning ideas meetings and so on. We're not like, hmm, not really a men's magazine story. But we are like, oh, that feels like us or that feels like a GQ story. And I think that is, I don't know, an electricity, like, for instance, for our long form, we always want them to be like filmic. We want it to feel like this could be a movie. And I think you want that same electricity in the like, you know, the daily stories on GQ.com.

9:44So it's less about thinking about our positioning of the men's magazine and more just like, is this smart? Is this funny? is this related to like fashion or style or that lens of taste and style that I articulated before? And then we really have fun pushing the boundaries of like where that can take you. You know, I also think I have always been interested and I started out at a music magazine that was basically like itself a subculture and also covered subcultures. But I think we're really interested in small little subcultures. And so that can take you to all kinds of like weird and funky digital places that can take you down really crazy wellness rabbit holes.

10:25Like the wellness subculture is like a big and wild and woolly one right now that we have been doing a lot of work in and driving a lot of just a lot of people reading those stories. Yeah, I think we're just looking for like texture, electricity. I always say that if people in the ideas meeting start fighting about whatever somebody has thrown out, then like you definitely need to assign that story and get it up. I know that you came from the fader where you covered a lot of stuff that would have been considered niche, but did you feel that broader change within GQ? And when did that happen, I guess?

10:55It really was like as the internet swallowed publishing. Like when I started at GQ 2007, the focus was on these big print issues, you know, that dropped on a desk like a phone book. And over time, it just became more and more about like our digital publishing. And with that became just like wildly different consumption habits. With that came more always on dialogue with the audience. People used to like write Jim Nelson letters from the editor and by write him a letter, I mean, they like wrote him a letter and mailed it to the Condé Nast offices. And now we're obviously in dialogue with our audience all day, every day on, on all these platforms.

11:35You guys are covering this all the time, like single content creators. and now drive an audience or have an influence that is on par with what was once like a giant, robust legacy media brand. I mean, that is an incredible shift. I was thinking recently about, because D 'Angelo passed, I was thinking about Amy Wallace's incredible D 'Angelo story, which I was involved in booking that story. I think it was 2012. And I was just trying to remember, like what was the environment that we published that into? Like how much feedback did we get? Obviously in 2012, like GQ.com was a robust place. Social media was, you know, nascent relative to where it is now.

12:20And then you go back to stories that we published when I got to GQ, like 2007 to 2010. And you just like hoped that page six, like picked up one of the images and published it. And And you hope that some friends texted you and said, oh, wow, amazing piece. Now we live in a world of data. You guys are going to be able to tell me exactly how many people didn't listen to my appearance on your podcast. Yeah, they're dropping off right here. You can decide whether or not to have me back. How about when it comes to sort of you personally? I mean, Condé Nast editors actually have always been part of the job has been to be a sort of embodiment of the brand.

12:56I don't know if you got there too late for like the free apartment of the black car. but still there's a real sort of... Come over to my place sometime, Ben, and you can tell me. But there's a real public role. And I'm curious if you felt that change. Like how much of your work is like I'm representing GQ versus how much is like I'm a faceless manager moving widgets and people. I definitely feel like a representative of GQ and I encourage the members of the team to think of themselves that way too. And I think they are. They don't really need to be encouraged but it is something that we talk about a little bit.

13:30But the other thing, Ben, that I believe is that if the magazine is going to be good, it needs to be deeply connected to the people who are making it happen. And obviously, as the editor, that starts with me, and I'm totally comfortable with that. But I just also, I wouldn't be interested in a piece of art or a magazine or anything if you couldn't discern the connection between the person making it and the output. So it's like the more personal something is, the more interesting and compelling it is to me. And I guess I have been fearless and I have encouraged my teammates to be fearless as well.

14:10And let's just make this like in some regards about us and trust that if we are like deeply connected to what we're making, people are going to respond to that. And an early example of this that really like solidified this perspective for me was there was a brief period that takes too long to explain, but I was editing a spinoff magazine called GQ style and the staff was three people and people would come up to me and be like, oh, I love GQ style, but why is there so much skateboarding in it? And I would be like, because we're a team of three and one of us is a skateboarder from Troy, New York named Noah Johnson.

14:44So I was learning about skateboarding through editing Noah's skateboarding coverage for GQ style. And I just learned that when you're trying to like quadrangulate audience data to maximize like, oh, we're going to get some of these people and some of those people and some of these people, and they're all going to come read this story. It ricks like every time. And when one person comes in fired up and they're like, you know what I read last night and here's what I think. And I want to do this. Like when you do that, that's when you see the audience respond. And it's really exciting to be, I think for the last handful of years, we've been in a time where like quality is actually what people read.

15:25We all remember the like really brutal clickbait era. That was not fun. I'm glad that in that area, there was still such thing as like a print job. And that's what I had because that was brutal. But these days it's just the good stories that people are reading and the ones that have like a deep cultural connection or a personal connection or a strong voice, which I think voice is becoming more important than ever as we all wake in our boots about AI or whatever's going on. Do you guys just publish fewer pieces and focus on the kind of bigger swings instead? Is that the real change that you're kind of talking about?

16:01I am proud and relieved that we have never invested in like being a massive daily digital content farm style outlet that was going for as many uvs as possible every day and that was the strategy i don't think the outlets that took that strategy i don't think it fared very well in the long term and it has never been our mo here there are certainly times when it felt like that was the order of the day and like it was terrifying to not be like slugging it out in that game but ultimately, I'm glad we didn't do that historically. And now I think we have a robust daily operation. We publish a lot more than a lot of people and a lot less than a lot.

16:46I don't know. I think we're just nestled in a good place where we are able to focus on quality and storytelling we believe in and a little bit of rigor. And when I say rigor, keep in mind, I'm talking about rigor, about stories about pants and stuff like that. But I certainly think It fits into this idea of GQ being this cool, more informed older brother who's giving you advice. I think when people are thinking about what they're aware of, there's some conversation about creatine happening. And they see that we have published a story on it. Is creatine actually good for your brain? That's a story we published a few weeks ago.

17:22They want to know what we have to say, and they trust that what we say is going to be informative and factually correct. And so we've invested in that because our readers are responding in it. So one of the alternatives in the media landscape these days to the cool older brother giving you advice is the manosphere, which might be like the troubled cousin at Thanksgiving. I'm really curious, like, what was your reaction to the kind of emergence of the kind of manosphere and the fixation that the media had on it? And how did you kind of navigate that moment immediately after the election when a bunch of people said, oh, my God, we got to start paying attention to what's going on with men?

18:04Yeah, my position has been that this is like a leadership opportunity for GQ going back to well before the election. In 2019, we published the new masculinity issue in November of 2019, which I think has been one of the defining statements, journalistic statements of this era of GQ. And it was an examination about the state of masculinity, how it was changing, how it was evolving. This was the heart of the Me Too movement. So it was obviously like a really important time to be having that discussion. And in fact, like, I would say the culture was just demanding that men develop a self-reflective like ability to be introspection and also demanding that men change.

18:44this was like the shut up and listen moment. And it was, that was interesting for us, right? Because we're like a daily content, daily men's content publishing platform. And the era is shut up and listen. We can't shut up. We're going to, we're going to have to be publishing. So what is a meaningful way to do that? Speaking so broadly, it's hard to not sound like overly general, but if in some regard, culturally women were demanding that men evolve, how exactly men should chart to path forward wasn't really the topic of conversation. The topic of conversation was men's historical bad behavior and the ways that they've used power to get away with that bad behavior.

19:25But what wasn't necessarily being articulated, and I think what a lot of thoughtful men who might be reading GQ were looking for some guidance on, I believe, was, well, how do I move forward? So it was like the constructive part of constructive criticism. And so we use this issue to begin to chart that path. And then, yeah, after the election, a lot of people who now work at GQ would bring it up to me in their interviews and be like, that issue is why I wanted to work here. And so there was in some regard this pressure to do it again. Let's make another statement about that because that was received very well and it kickstarted a conversation that was valuable.

20:07But I really believe that the timing has to be right to do something where you're going to dedicate a whole issue and all of the attendant digital platforms to one exploration or one concept. But yeah, coming out of the election, the rise of the manosphere, an incredible op edification of masculinity, especially Gen Z. It felt like the time was right for us to weigh in again. And so we did that with the October issue of this year, which was the state of the American male in 2025. And again, it was a full issue. And whenever I say issue in this regard, I mean print and all of the digital that surrounds it.

20:48A full issue exploration, including a survey of just shy of 2 ,000 American men about their opinions and perspectives on different norms, expectations of masculinity, etc. There is a sense that young men right now are sort of the heart of the MAGA movement and of just a real shift to the right culturally, kind of a backlash against that new masculinity. Do you see that? And do you write those people off as readers? Oh, no, definitely don't write them off as readers. Definitely do see that. Yeah, the shift rightward among young men is undeniable. But no, we don't write them off as readers at all.

21:22There's a feature in the October State of the American Mail issue called Eight Voices Across the Great Masculinity Divide. And the idea was to represent a whole spectrum of different voices of people who we find thoughtful on these subjects, whether they're coming from, generally speaking, the right, the left, the center, etc. Do you think that the new masculinity issue or the politics of it, or maybe more broadly, those social movements and the Me Too movement drove those young men to the right? Because that's what a lot of them say. If that's what a lot of them say, and I agree, I've also observed a lot of them saying that, then who am I or anybody else to say that something else did it?

22:01If they're like, no, this is what drove me there. A lot of those ideas, a lot of the terminology, for instance, that came out of the Me Too movement, for instance, or Black Lives Matter and so on got like… So like toxic masculinity? Yeah, that got like lassoed together as wokeism and as DEI. And that got a huge pushback. A lot of the ads running towards the end of the election from like super PACs associated with Trump and so on were directly attacking wokeism, DEI, the woke mind virus, etc, etc. So I think that was effective, absolutely. And I think young men were a prime target for that kind of communication because they very much felt under fire, and they haven't necessarily understood what the best way forward is.

22:52And the reason the manosphere became prominent is because young men were looking for guidance. You take this job just as the sort of social media model of scale and scaled advertising and social media traffic is just falling off the cliff. And, you know, everybody has pivoted to video and is regretting it. But print is still dead. I'm just curious, like, I mean, do you just go into your office and cry? Like, what's the – where do you pivot to in that particular, like, very dark media moment of 2018? I, to be honest, at that time was focused on getting all of the brand, including all of its platforms to shift away from this broad general interest, wide open barn door men's magazine.

23:44Like we speak to American men and we cover everything all the time. That's obviously an exaggeration, but there was a little bit of that sensibility to this idea of there is opportunity for real growth in terms of audience and in terms of revenue. If we can focus on what makes GQ different from every other outlet out there. So to be honest, it's like that project included, but was like bigger than just focusing on UVs and engagement and those kinds of things. And so I was trying to like reimagine the positioning of GQ from the top down and the current trends in web publishing were certainly a critical part of that.

24:34But if anything was making me cry those days, it wasn't that. Well, we have to take a short break, but we have a lot more to get to with Will right after this.

24:51In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I spoke with Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about what he saw at CES. So, Josh, you were at CES at the beginning of this year. Why does that event matter for CMOs? So CES gives us a real view into how people are going to be living their lives and spending their money in two, five, even 10 years time. I know from the outside, it looks like a giant toy show. There's smart rings and foldable laundry robots and flying cars. But I was chatting with Shelley Palmer, who I interviewed for my new podcast. He's an AI visionary and tech leader.

25:30And he swears by, and I agree with him, that the ability to see patterns amongst all the gadgets is actually really, really compelling for near term and into the future. So what did you learn from that conversation? Well, the gadgets aren't really the thing. Stuff gets announced. Some of it launches. Some of it doesn't launch. What you're really looking for are business model changes, the new paradigms that are emerging. So two that I saw and we spoke about, one is around agentic commerce. Google announced during CES and just after CES a whole bunch of partnerships with Shopify, with Walmart, with Target around agentic commerce.

26:09Super interesting building the new protocols for machines doing the shopping for you where appropriate. And then separately, I also saw a lot of expansion of what you might call intelligent ecosystems. These are technologies from different companies coming together, meshing together to enable you to do more interesting and engaging things. And again, with Google and Gemini leading the way, they're really fascinating forerunners of where we're all going to be in the near and medium term. And where can people listen to the whole thing? You can listen to my conversation with Shelley Palmer in my new podcast, Frontier CMO, on YouTube or wherever you download podcasts, or you can sign up for my weekly newsletter over on LinkedIn.